Meet Linda, A Small Business Owner…
Linda owns a small business. She outsources a lot of the marketing to companies that do things she can’t, and she trusts that they are doing their jobs correctly. The problem is that she only has so much money in her budget for marketing, and is almost maxed out. She’s paying someone when she needs improvements to her website, an agency to manage social media marketing, a content writer to write for her site and blog - and she knows that she could get a lot of free traffic and more leads if she could only rank higher on Google. Linda has been looking into cost effective SEO services and wonders that even if she can afford them in her budget, will they be worth it? Should she add SEO (search engine optimization) services to her current marketing mix? Will they really be cost effective?
What Should Linda Do?
To start, it would be good for Linda to zoom out and take a bird’s eye view of her marketing efforts. While all of the pieces and parts are important (such as social media and website development), it is not ideal to view them in isolation from each other.
What we do here at Half a Bubble Out is called inbound marketing, where content is used to naturally draw people to your website. Inbound marketing utilizes many important pieces and parts of marketing (including search engine optimization) that we have already mentioned, but combines them under the umbrella of an overall philosophy of attracting people naturally.
What Linda needs to do is identify her target audience (who she wants as her customers) and focus her efforts on one goal – naturally drawing interested people to her site that are likely to become customers. This means that content creation, social media profiles and sharing, SEO techniques, and website design & optimization will all come together to work efficiently and will help her site to rank for key terms on Google.
How Does This Make For Cost Effective SEO?
The difference between Linda’s current situation of fragmented services compared to an inbound marketing philosophy is that she may be wasting a lot of money by not getting the most out of her marketing services:
- If site content isn’t tailored to the topics that Linda’s customers are interested in, she won’t attract the right people on Google or other search engines.
- If her site doesn’t have a way for customers to move through the buying funnel efficiently, sales will be less likely.
- If she doesn’t have some of the key SEO technical measures in place her site won’t be as noticeable to search engines.
- If content isn’t shared on social media with the ideal customer and their buying path in mind then social media may not bring qualified traffic.
- All of this leads to wasted time and money on multiple disconnected services.
Those are all of the negatives of a disorganized marketing effort that lead to wasting important marketing dollars. The best thing for Linda to do if she is trying to get cost effective SEO is to tie all of her marketing efforts together into an inbound approach that has a clear path from start to finish for acquiring customers. With this approach, she will have a much better chance of showing up on Google and other search engines, and will be able to get more for her marketing dollars.
*Linda is a fictional character, but her marketing problems are all too common in small businesses that we consult with.
If you would like to learn more about the Inbound Marketing Approach and how it leads to more cost effective seo, download our free eBook below:
Since 2002, Half a Bubble Out has been dedicated to providing marketing, advertising and small business consulting that meet the needs of our clients. We specialize in powerfully telling stories through Inbound Marketing to grow your business filled with more passion and provision. Based in Chico California, we serve clients throughout Northern California and across the country to New York.
